The present invention relates to application level control of hardware functionality in embedded devices. The hardware functionality involves antialiasing of three dimensional (3D) images processed by a 3D graphics pipeline with such a device. In certain respects, the present invention relates to mobile phones with such hardware functionality.
Many types of embedded devices are provided with 3D graphics pipelines that process 3D images of scenes. A given scene is composed of a collection of rendering objects (e.g., triangles). Such 3D pipelines may perform antialiasing on the image. Antialiasing involves first oversampling the image—resulting in an enhanced amount of information represented by a now more abundant set of (oversampled) pixels. The Quincunx scheme, Full-Scene Antialiasing (FSAA), the accumulation buffer, and Carpenter's A-buffer (sometimes called multisampling) are a few examples of techniques for carrying out antialiasing oversampling or enhanced sampling of a given image.
The final image is frequently rendered at the lower pre-oversampled resolution, in which case the antialiasing process is completed by weighting (e.g., averaging) the greater set of samples to produce the reduced set.